Re: [Usability] Usability study for GNOME on netbooks?

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

<snip>
On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 15:53 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote:
> As many of you know, I'm interested in putting together a usability
> study for GNOME on netbooks.
> 
> I've gotten a few quotes from usability companies/contractors and I've
> gotten some interest from advisory board member companies.
> 
> However, I could use some help shaping up the study. I'm not a
> usability expert, nor really a GNOME on netbook expert (just a user),
> so I could use some help.
> 
> Things left to do:
</snip>

<snip>
> - Figure out ways to keep costs low by involving volunteers, giving
> things other than money to those that help (publicity, making all the
> data public and accredited to the organization, ...)
</snip>

This is a good (and interesting) question to ask. In an ideal world,
third-party usability testing would form one part of a more general
usability effort which would make use of the resources that we already
have available. I say ideal, because it's important to be realistic
about what we can do.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a number sources of data which
could be combined in this more general effort:

* Bug data - an important resource for assessing and researching
usability. Is it possible to extract and summarise usability bugs
relating to netbooks?

* Volunteer run usability testing, using something like Pongo [1].

* Evidence that has already fed into the GNOME 3.0 design effort,
particularly from the City of Largo [2].

* Existing expertise and analysis from designers and developers,
particularly those involved in the GNOME 3.0 effort. Here I agree with
Paul - a good focus would be to test and develop the design ideas around
3.0 [3, 4].

* Evidence and ideas from Ubuntu Brainstorm (and other similar projects)
[5].

Assembling, summarising and synthesising all this data is a big job, but
it *might* be doable. Such an exercise would help frame and define the
aims of a third party usability project.

Just my two cents...

Best,

Allan
---
aday on irc.gnome.org

[1] http://live.gnome.org/Pongo

[2]
http://live.gnome.org/Boston2008/GUIHackfest/CityOfLargoPresentation, 

[3] http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/Plan

[4]
http://live.gnome.org/Boston2008/GUIHackfest?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=organise_presentation.pdf

[5] http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/?keywords=netbook&tags=